Bits and Pieces

I recently started watching the first season of Blindspot and one of the first few episodes they introduced a character called Rich Dotcom, a dark net millionaire that made all his money on bitcoin.

Samourai Wallet

Samson Mow broke a story on twitter of a kind of Articles of Federation for the Bitcoin Unlimited army. You can read it here. Greg Maxwell had a great response to this leaked letter you can read here. Basically, this isn’t saying anything special or unique. It’s a politic ploy to make people think that Core doesn’t agree with it. Anyone that doesn’t agree with BU is made to look like they don’t agree with these simple statements. Notice they don’t say anything about fungibility, privacy, or viability.

Samourai Wallet has been pointing out that wallets should build features and provide services to users, and not be worrying about politics or signing agreements like Mycelium. Samourai Wallet is my recommended Android wallet. You can download it by visiting their website to get on the Alpha list, and consider supporting them at their donate page once you have their app set up.

Bitcoin is Back

Herman Gref the CEO of Russia’s largest bank Sberbank, claims to have dabbled in bitcoin. He also says, “it will soon be our whole life”. This is a huge deal as Russia just recently appeared hostile to bitcoin, and that there are many MM schemes from there. Bitcoin is being talked about in the high halls in banking, taking the place of “blockchain”.

A new payment service has popped up to provide payments on Amazon via bitcoin called iPayYou. They had a write up on PYMTS.com this week. I’m not too excited about this. It’s Purse.io without the discounts. It’s not Amazon accepting bitcoin directly, and this service is has nothing inherently better with it than credit cards. Good headline though.

Goldman, JP Morgan, and Santander Pull Out of R3CEV

You’ve probably heard about the R3 consortium falling apart. Goldman and JPM, the two banks that are squarely on the inside of regulation and the TBTF space have pulled out. This isn’t a good sign for the “blockchain” space as a whole, and I see it as a very negative market signal for projects like Ethereum and Lisk and other blockchain app projects.

Featured Article

Segwit and Bitcoin Unlimited, Censorship, and Crybabies

I appeared on the Bitcoin News Show’s 1 Year Anniversary show on the 21st of Nov, hosted by @TheOneVortex. I enjoyed it. I got to meet Thomas Hunt who I’ve been watching for 5 years or so. All the topics were relevant to bitcoin current events, but the one I really liked was the Segwit and Unlimited discussion. Here is what I had to say about that.

The ViaBTC CEO has an AMA on reddit, and he came across as arrogant and out of touch. There’s lot’s of insight to be gained from this AMA, I recommend reading at least the top comments. Their claim of censorship is silly. No one is scared for their lives or freedom. You can say whatever you want. The restiction of unpopular and subjectively dangerous comments on one subreddit, is not censorship. Do you know what censorship is? It’s sending people to prison, killing them, freezing their accounts and tying them up in court. This is not censorship. This censorship argument could always work here, because what they are seeing as censorship is just being very unpopular.

BU and ViaBTC want to compromise with Bitcoin Core. That is not going to happen. They should expect retaliation by other miners with a weaker moral compass than Core. They are using terrorist tactics, and there’s nothing to stop their victims from fighting back.